tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/melbourne-festival-2016-31938/articlesMelbourne Festival 2016 – The Conversation2016-10-20T05:52:34Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/673792016-10-20T05:52:34Z2016-10-20T05:52:34ZIn 887, Robert Lepage has built a memory palace out of theatre<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142460/original/image-20161020-15067-1c5a1iy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Robert Lepage explores his past, and the notion of memory, in his autobiographical show 887.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Robert Lepage’s autobiographical show at the Melbourne Festival, 887, is named for his childhood apartment building: 887 Avenue Murray in Quebec City. Lepage wrote, designed, directed and performed 887, but to call it a one-man show does not give enough credit to the equal performance of the set. </p>
<p>Through a gloriously intricate series of folding boxes, scale models, and video projections, Lepage and his Ex Machina team presented the apartment building as a material “memory palace”. It’s a mnemonic device bought to life: the rememberer imaginatively “places” pieces of complex information in particular rooms of a familiar place and then mentally “walks” through the place to retrieve the information.</p>
<p>Like a number of recent productions in Melbourne, 887 made prominent use of screens and video projections. This time last year, the UK company Headlong’s Melbourne Festival production of <a href="http://artsreview.com.au/nineteen-eightyfour/">1984</a> included large-scale video projections, making an obvious link to surveillance technologies. </p>
<p>In April-May 2016, the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of <a href="http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/live-reviews/review-miss-julie-melbourne-theatre-company">Miss Julie</a> used live projection to extend the logic of stage naturalism as cameras followed the actors beyond the kitchen setting to film action offstage. </p>
<p>And in May-June 2016, Eamon Flack’s production of <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/the-glass-menagerie-review-detail-and-depth-of-genuinely-touching-tennessee-williams-classic-lost-from-row-f-20160520-gozpmy.html">The Glass Menagerie</a> at the Malthouse Theatre (first staged at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre) framed the stage with two screens of live-edited, soft-focused footage.</p>
<p>In 887, as in The Glass Menagerie, video projection was a technology of memory. In the first moments of the show Lepage, holding his mobile phone, reminded the audience to silence ours and went on to discuss how he no longer remembers his own phone number, because so much of what he needs to remember is stored in the phone itself.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142463/original/image-20161020-15081-teizuh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142463/original/image-20161020-15081-teizuh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip"></a>
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<span class="caption">Robert Lepage points to 887 Avenue Murray in Quebec City, his childhood apartment building.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied</span></span>
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<p>By locating his phone number in the mobile rather than his mind, Lepage showed contemporary technology as externalising memory. Lepage projected video from the phone onto a screen at various points during the show, for instance peering into the scale model apartments of 887 Avenue Murray – often with his comparatively gigantic face and fingers visible through the windows or manipulating the tiny furniture and inhabitants.</p>
<p>The externalisation of memory has its pitfalls and limitations, which Lepage played for laughs. In one running gag, Lepage tried to leave his actor friend a voicemail, but he spoke so circuitously that he kept getting cut off before conveying the content of his message. Lepage finally tried to leave his mobile number, only to find that his friend’s mailbox was now full. </p>
<p>I found this gag funny, not least for its obsolescence, since nowadays one needn’t leave one’s phone number when calling a mobile: the phone records it. </p>
<p>Recording technologies also enable forms of memory that predate the events they memorialise. The same friend, once summoned, turns out to be employed reading “cold cuts” – celebrity obituaries recorded in advance of their deaths – for Canadian radio. He has recorded Lepage’s cold cut, which Lepage manages to extract from him on USB. </p>
<p>In the ensuing scene, Lepage listened to his own obituary, reacting with a mix of ambivalence and outrage to the pre-recorded account of his artistic achievements. Lepage listened via headphones plugged into his laptop, so the audience did not hear the obituary; lowered lighting and Lepage’s bland and thunderous expressions suggested his dissatisfaction with the content.</p>
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<span class="caption">Can we externalise memories?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied</span></span>
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<p>887 also linked memory to the politics of language. Lepage narrates and then acts out his inability to memorise Québécois writer Michèle Lalonde’s 1968 poem <a href="http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=738881">Speak White</a>, which he has promised to recite live at an event. </p>
<p>“Speak white” is a racist insult aimed at non-English-speaking Canadians, and Lalonde’s poem, written in French, protests linguistic oppression. Lepage said that he was unable to memorise Speak White because only a man as humble as his father, a taxi driver, had the right to speak the poem. But in a climactic scene, Lepage did recite the poem in French with English surtitles. </p>
<p>Scenes of immersive “plot” rather than “memory” – for instance, scenes involving Lepage and his friend, rather than Lepage’s account of his childhood in Quebec – were likewise spoken in French. Was the implication that Lepage had become as humble as his father? I think, instead, it was that Lepage inhabited a version of his father.</p>
<p>Can we mobilise the externalisation of memory to political ends? Can we use it to wear our fathers’ bodies and to speak in voices stronger and more humble than our own? While these questions and the dazzling scenography bring the show beyond memoir, it is memoir that helps Lepage to answer them.</p>
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<p><em><a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/2016/events/887/#.WAhDTJN97UY">887</a> is showing at the Arts Centre Melbourne until October 22.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67379/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Balkin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>We all store parts of our memory outside of our head: in our phones, our computers and our friends. In 887, Robert Lepage brings his memory to life in a gloriously intricate one-man production.Sarah Balkin, Lecturer, English and Theatre Studies, University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/669862016-10-13T04:45:15Z2016-10-13T04:45:15ZDeath, beauty and poetry come together in Ancient Rain<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141561/original/image-20161013-16217-erhmwm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Paul Kelly, Camille O’Sullivan and Feargal Murray marry poetry and music in a compelling performance as part of the Melbourne Festival.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sarah Walker</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>This new concert, or you might say themed performance, opened at the Melbourne Art Centre on Wednesday evening. It gave the big audience lots of pleasure, with occasional puzzlement.</p>
<p>Paul Kelly is well known round here as a serious all-rounder, but especially as a grave song-writer. Now he has turned from Australian topics to those sounded by modern Irish poetry. He is paired with singer <a href="http://www.camilleosullivan.com/">Camille O’Sullivan</a>, dubbed “a shape-shifter”, who has worked with Paul and with pianist <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/how-we-met-feargal-murray-camille-osullivan-8050294.html">Feargal Murray</a> in setting the melange of chosen poems ebulliently to music. She has an instinct for musical narrative.</p>
<p>The poets range agewise from <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1923/yeats-bio.html">W.B. Yeats</a> through to the young <a href="http://www.nationalgallery.ie/en/Exhibitions/Lines_of_Vision/Enda_Wyley.aspx">Enda Wyley</a>. But one has to grant that those who punters would call the favourites – at this racing time of the year – continue to stand out. </p>
<p>Three famous Yeats poems, including a rendition of <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/43289">Easter 1916</a>, that great Rebellion lament, were compelling above all on Wednesday night. But then, so was the quietly plangent ending of Joyce’s story <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/958/">The Dead</a>, read here a deux. There is nothing like it in modern fiction.</p>
<p>We tend to think of Ireland as a land continually sprayed by the showers of the Atlantic, or from any nearby waters. “Ancient Rain” is a title as metaphor. Rain like history wears everything down to its present form, that is to say its present fate. The roles of Irish women, soldiers, rebels, parents and of the young dead are all invoked as drenched by that rain.</p>
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<span class="caption">Light, movement and acoustics lent an intimate feel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sarah Walker</span></span>
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<p>How can you draw a dilly-bag of poems together to make an event, an evening? Well, in Chris Drummond’s direction, use was made of the stage’s great depth, as well as of lighting as a form of eloquence.</p>
<p>The poems were rendered with spectacular variation, sometimes deeply moving, if at times distracting from the lyrics.</p>
<p>Sequence matters, so that Seamus Heaney’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/47555">Digging</a>, with its fertile sense of national soil, turned poetry up to our immediate attention. What you dig up with the warmest of energy may well end up chill as falling snow, as this program displayed for us. Mind you, in a number of these musical settings, volume was heartily turned up before the last lines were over. Human predicament as climax?</p>
<p>Musical accompaniment was close, four instruments only. Between them Camille often moved rhythmically, articulating space as though alluding to the four provinces of Ireland. It’s a rural land, after all. But city music came frequently to mind as the songs mediated between pub music and concert hall. Yeats’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/57311">An Irish Airman Foresees his Death</a>, a proleptic elegy for a close friend’s son, was of neither genre, only its passionate self.</p>
<p>Camille had a key role in presenting Paula Meehan’s piece, turning on <a href="https://apoemforireland.rte.ie/shortlist/the-statue-of-the-virgin-at-granard/">a statue of the Virgin</a>. She was oddly compelling, but the Virgin’s role is not my cup of tea. This item was surely too long, its form straggly, even if its function was to end the first half of our evening. Across the program, however, Camille interacted subtly with Paul again and again, reality coming back at unexpected angles.</p>
<p>Like history itself, Act Two opened with the theme and cost of wars: in a passionate compulsion from the two stringed instruments. These led in turn into another dated poem by Yeats, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/57309">September 1913</a> as hot ballad. And what is that date but the eve of the Great War, a monstrous conflict in which many Irish fought and suffered, although they didn’t have to.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141565/original/image-20161013-16217-ym84qs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141565/original/image-20161013-16217-ym84qs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip"></a>
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<span class="caption">‘They call me Mary – Blessed, Holy, Virgin.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sarah Walker</span></span>
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<p>Yet in the heart of 1916 Dublin some patriots died who</p>
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<p>Wherever green is worn, <br>
Are changed, changed utterly: <br>
A terrible beauty is born.</p>
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<p>There is the human oxymoron for us all.</p>
<p>Perhaps the emerald isle is always paradox. Yes, it long has been, for six or seven decades, at least. But also deeply poetic and musical, rooted in family life, as Patrick Kavanagh’s two poems reminded us. They were the very opposites of that warlike thrumming that opened Act Two.</p>
<p>I should note that on the night the diction did not always carry to the back of the hall. Well, it was a large auditorium, while some of the songs had a more intimate feel. At least until the accompanists turned up volume and tempo. Then the rafters were lifted.</p>
<p>And quiet voices could also sway us with soft eloquence. As when Camille and Paul finally evoked the falling snow, which </p>
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<p>lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.</p>
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<p>Death can indeed be the mother of beauty.</p>
<p>Perhaps there was a strong meaning to all these contrasts of light and movement, piano and fortissimo. The contagious music of Ireland is no single thing. Neither metropolitan nor village square, it is eloquence above all. And was so, on the night.</p>
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<p><em><a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/2016/events/ancient-rain/#.V_7QGJN97UY">Ancient Rain</a> is showing at the Melbourne Arts Centre from October 12 to October 15.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66986/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher Wallace-Crabbe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In a new collaboration, Paul Kelly has joined singer Camille O'Sullivan and pianist Feargal Murray to set 100 years of Irish poetry to music. As the emerald isle is sung into being, the words of Yeats and Joyce still stand out.Christopher Wallace-Crabbe, Honorary Professor, Culture and Communication, University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/665632016-10-05T06:15:03Z2016-10-05T06:15:03ZVirtual reality film Collisions is part disaster movie, part travelogue and completely immersive<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140412/original/image-20161005-20235-a820j5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Collisions director Lynette Wallworth used drones and 360 degree filming to create a totally immersive experience. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Indigenous elder Nyarri Nyarri Morgan’s first contact with Europeans was observing – without context – one of the Maralinga atomic tests. This dramatic first contact forms the focus of Lynette Wallworth’s digital art/documentary Collisions, opening at ACMI tomorrow as part of the Melbourne Festival. </p>
<p>The 17-minute work showcases innovative excellence in virtual reality and 360 degree panoramic photography combined with computer animation, and an ultra-dynamic soundscape. </p>
<p>Set in the Western Desert, it contains elements of the disaster movie, the travelogue, and the nature story; and represents the uniquely personal vision of Nyarri. </p>
<p>Born in the desert near Maralinga, he also witnessed the 1960s <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2010/11/09/3061650.htm">Blue Streak Rocket tests</a>. As a child Nyarri was taken to the Jigalong mission, and is now a painter (and expert horseman) of the Martu people, who reclaimed their land in the 1970s in a legal and ethical stand against uranium mining.</p>
<p>Collisions is clearly conceived and imagined by an artist at her peak and an indigenous collaborator with a powerful message. Their vision is engineered by innovation experts and delivered with uberrealism and total immersion; the real world disappears. “Awesome” is the appropriate adjective. In this magical, mediated “place” we exist so real and yet so virtual. We are in the earliest phase of VR evolution and so far, virtual environments are often clunky versions of the “uncanny valley”.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140409/original/image-20161005-20235-wz3ei3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140409/original/image-20161005-20235-wz3ei3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip"></a>
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<span class="caption">Nyarri Nyarri Morgan in Collisions.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Piers Mussared</span></span>
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<p>Enter the neatly designed immersive theatre at ACMI; slip on your headgear and grab a comfy swivel chair – your vehicle for the experience. You arrive in Nyarri’s home turf by air. Get into the act: you are the camera, can glide around, crane up and down and lean into this world. You find points of access inside a seamless image apparently your own creation (there is no screen) that replaces your “real” environment with a new, temporary or virtual reality; the Western Desert.</p>
<p>Science fiction hit movie The Matrix reminds us that virtual reality has a loose relationship with “truth” and can be used to trick us. This ultra-crisp VR immersion allows inspection of several gorgeous landscapes from all angles. We are at liberty to roam within the scope allowed by 360 degree cameras airborne by drones. </p>
<p>The rig at ACMI is driven by proprietary software from Visual Playgrond paired with Oculus Rift headsets and top-shelf headphones. The image is all happening inside the headset, triggered by a master computer. Headsets on, we are THERE, in the matrix as it were.</p>
<p>THERE as we “fly” above a convoy of trucks entering Martu country. We receive our welcome to the land by Nyarri and his grandson Curtis and are THERE by the hill that they are protecting; a hill that holds uranium. After seeing the Maralinga and Blue Streak Rocket tests, Nyarri is sure this spirit should not be unleashed upon a land better served by custodians who will prevent disaster. </p>
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<span class="caption">Nyarri Nyarri Morgan first contact with Europeans was witnessing an atomic test.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Piers Mussared</span></span>
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<p>We are THERE in his space; his home, his paintings of mushroom clouds. THERE with his family as they tend the land “painting with fire” in a controlled burn-off to prevent wildfire and encourage new growth. A powerful metaphor indeed.</p>
<p>The soundtrack, engineered by Lucas Films Skywalk studio, provides a tantalising surround-soundscape that leads us further into the image, around corners of discovery to follow the giggles of children, red dogs, birds and the wind – I swivel around and crane my head to discover unique moments and angles within the larger vision. I tilt my head to discover the moon above by surprise. </p>
<p>Every audience member literally sees a different version of events and there is no way you can cover the full 360 degrees of panoramic possibility; it’s an infinite feast of imagery and locations. The detail is exquisite. I reach out to touch the rocks, every one of which is “known” to Aboriginal caretakers. A dramatic highpoint occurs as we are caught in a nuclear explosion. Somehow kids will love this animated scene; kept “safe” amid destructive, cosmic splendour and reassured by the gently confident narration of our witness, Nyarri.</p>
<p>This brilliant showcase is the brainchild of Australian artist Lynette Wallworth and was produced by US-based producer Nicole Newnham, with support from the Sundance Institute. This is the third of Wallworth’s works located in the desert heart of their community. The artist is invited back because she offers a respectful “deep listening” approach to the messages therein. Her beautiful aesthetics and technical virtuousity invite us to absorb the heartfelt legal and ethical stand that the Martu people make against uranium mining.</p>
<p>Wallworth has shown at the World Economic Forum, Davos, the Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts, The American Museum of Natural History, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and so on. Her affinity with scientific projects ignites our appetite for spectacle and colour while grounding us in information that raises new questions, new ideas. </p>
<p>Kudos to ACMI, the Adelaide Film Festival and Australia Council for supporting this breakthrough work which marries the emergent tools of virtual reality with new perspectives on Australian cosmology, art, landcare and human rights.</p>
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<p><em>Collisions is showing at the <a href="https://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au/agsa/home/Events/COLLISIONS.html">Art Gallery of South Australia</a> from October 5 to October 30, at <a href="https://www.acmi.net.au/collisions">ACMI</a> from October 6 to January 15, and at the <a href="http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/homeground/collisions.aspx">Sydney Opera House on October 8 and 9</a>.</em></p>
<p><em>Lynette Wallworth and Indigenous elder Nyarri Nyarri Morgan will both give a <a href="https://www.acmi.net.au/collisions">talk at ACMI on October 8 </a>.</em> <em>The ACMI exhibition and talk events are both co-presented by Melbourne Festival.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66563/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lisa Dethridge does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>What if your first contact with the Western world was witnessing an atomic test? This is the story of Nyarri Nyarri Morgan, told in stunning virtual reality in animation/documentary hybrid Collisions.Lisa Dethridge, Coordinator Masters of Media Professional Research; Game Design Research, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.